We performed a comparison between Meraki MX and Palo Alto Networks VM-Series based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two Firewalls solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."The integration with Active Directory is one of the good features. Most of the customers are now looking for the Single Sign-on feature. So, being able to integrate Active Directory with the firewall is useful. It is also easy."
"This product is definitely scalable."
"Fortinet FortiGate is scalable for our users. Right now, we have almost 70 users. We do not have any plan to increase our usage of FortiGate. For maintaining the firewall solution, one staff member is enough."
"The most valuable features of Fortinet FortiGate are it is one of the most mature firewalls in the UTM bundle."
"In terms of security, we have not experienced any security flaws or loopholes, and it has proven to be quite stable."
"Whenever we raise a complaint with FortiGate, their response and resolution times are minimal."
"I am "headache free" that I don't have to categorize all the websites and that security has been pre categorized by the people, and that the services are getting updated. At least one part of my problem is over."
"It's super reliable. I don't think I've ever had a reliability issue with it."
"The technical support people from Meraki are brilliant."
"The initial setup for me was straightforward."
"Easy to administer and saves time when you have many smaller locations that you have to manage."
"I am happy with the technical support for the solution. I rate the technical support a ten out of ten."
"I love the simplicity of Meraki MX — specifically, the simplicity of the dashboard."
"The product is quite secure, easy to manage, and well-connected with other devices."
"A strong, reliable solution for small companies with little or no dedicated IT department."
"WAN optimization is the best feature of the solution."
"It allows us to see all our traffic to properly secure it and only allow what is needed through the firewall."
"App-ID and User-ID have repeatedly shown value in securing business critical systems."
"The most valuable feature is the Posture Assessment."
"You already can scale it if you put it in Auto Scaling groups. If you put it in a load balancer, it should already be able to scale."
"It is reliable and the support is very good."
"It offers a single pane of glass for all the different types of installations."
"Palo Alto Networks VM-Series's most valuable feature is the visibility of the environment."
"We use the product on our Azure network firewalls."
"The setup is pretty complex and not easy to implement."
"Fortinet needs more memory to save the log files. We need it to save the logs on the hardware and not in the cloud. I know this feature is available in FortiCloud, but if we need this log locally, it is not available."
"It needs more available central management."
"Fortinet needs to overhaul its documentation."
"The feedback that I have received is that the performance could be better, and the user experience is not as good compared to a previous solution we used. It could be more user-friendly. Of course, it still works fine for our operations."
"The performance could be a bit better. Right now, I find it to be lacking. Having good performance is very important for our work."
"There are some cloud-based features that could be much more flexible than they currently are."
"The solution is very expensive."
"From the improvement perspective, we need more monitoring capabilities. We want to have full-based access visibility, such as, what is happening when something is trying to reach and it is denying. We cannot see some parts of it. The integration of active directory with this product is not very fruitful. It has some bugs or lacks in the functionality of active directory integration. We are unable to identify where exactly and whether it has really applied our policy."
"The IPS, the Intrusion Prevention System, can be improved."
"It would be nice to get detailed logging information without third-party software."
"Could possibly use deeper configurations."
"It is very expensive."
"The problem is that the two licenses do not currently integrate. We have to create separate companies and do an interconnection."
"In the next release, because the security is pretty basic, I think they could include additional security features."
"You cannot use switching behaviors as you see on the Meraki switch."
"The solution needs to have more easily searchable details or documentation about it online, so it's easier to Google if you have queries."
"Integrative capabilities with other solutions should be addressed."
"AWS doesn't integrate well with third-party firewalls."
"The current licensing model can be a sore point as we're paying for features we're not fully utilizing."
"There should be an option for direct integration with the Azure platform."
"The product's AIOps process needs improvement."
"The reporting part of the product is an area of concern where improvements are required."
"It would be good if the common features work consistently in physical and virtual environments. There was an integration issue in the virtual deployment where it didn't report the interface counters, and we had to upgrade to the latest version, whereas the same thing has been working in the physical deployment for ages now. It seems that it was because of Azure. We were using VMware before, and we didn't have any such issues. We do see such small issues where we expect things to work, but they don't because of some incompatibilities. There also seems to be a limitation on how to do high availability in a virtualized environment. All features should be consistently available in physical and virtual environments. It is not always easy to integrate Palo Alto in the network management system. We would like to be able to compare two network management systems. They can maybe allow monitoring an interface through the GUI to create a reference or do a baseline check about whether your network monitoring system is actually giving you the correct traffic figures. You need traffic figures to be able to recognize the trends and plan the capacity."
Meraki MX is ranked 2nd in Unified Threat Management (UTM) with 57 reviews while Palo Alto Networks VM-Series is ranked 10th in Firewalls with 52 reviews. Meraki MX is rated 8.2, while Palo Alto Networks VM-Series is rated 8.6. The top reviewer of Meraki MX writes "Cost-effective, simplified, easy to manage, and reliable with advanced security features and granular visibility". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Palo Alto Networks VM-Series writes "Many features are optimized for troubleshooting real-time scenarios, saving a lot of time". Meraki MX is most compared with Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls, Cisco Secure Firewall, Sophos XG, SonicWall TZ and Netgate pfSense, whereas Palo Alto Networks VM-Series is most compared with Azure Firewall, Fortinet FortiGate-VM, Cisco Secure Firewall, Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls and KerioControl. See our Meraki MX vs. Palo Alto Networks VM-Series report.
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